From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-12-08T23:42:31+09:00
Subject: Re: They say I write Ruby like Perl

On Dec 8, 2005, at 8:27 AM, Rich wrote:

> I'd be interested to know *why* it is a language convention, and more
> important why it is a lanaguage convention that from this thread it
> seems rubyists vigorously insist upon?  For those of us who were
> "raised" with a language like Java (or as some on this list may say,
> brain damaged ;-), lowerCamelCase seems more pleasing to the eye than
> identifiers_with_underscores.

We feel exactly the opposite.  That's your *why*.  ;)

The human eye picks out words by shape.  We use spaces between words  
to separate those shapes into easily digested chunks.  OneLongWord is  
not a shape we are use to, so we have to stop and think.   
Unfortunately, spaces aren't allowed in programming variables.  The _  
character is allowed though and the next best thing, so we go with that.

This is all my opinion, of course.

James Edward Gray II